I can feel her blond hair brushing your shoulder and the heat of her temple where hers touches yours. I tell myself she’s someone’s old friend. I tell myself she’s the gal who brings a laugh with your palm tree inspired mai-tai fix. Or maybe she just bought the last cold round of beer.

So what? Maybe she loves your kind of music or just found herself there needing to be found by somebody honest, somebody more than she’s had? She’s somebody’s old friend or your neighbor or maybe his wife, hmmm?

It doesn’t matter. Can’t matter. Can’t be learned. I can’t ask.

Keep me in my blinders the size of Texas. Social media doesn’t come with a soothing narrative. Stalking is for the off-balanced mess.

Like this:

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

Eleanor Catton Happy birthday, Eleanor Catton! Her 2013 novel, The Luminaries, is the longest book ever to win the Man Booker Award, but that’s not the only record she holds. Catton is also the youngest author ever to take home the prize.

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Make things happen.

#for Reticent Mental Property. Images and link to video courtesy of the web.

Like this:

They lean, they shift their weight, they are lined up along the south wall.

Tall and strong, one wiry and wearing boots. Some stand solid sipping a cocktail, today’s paper folded under the arm. A few with button down shirts tucked into slacks, move a briefcase along the floor with every step toward the front of the line.

Every few slots is someone athletic, maybe in running shoes, maybe the dimple from the curve of muscle ending above the bend of elbow, the morning workouts that cannot be hidden by the sleeve.

Then the GQ types, randomly interspersed, wearing those leather shoes, the ones that speak of travels to Italy, maybe a pair of readers perched toward the end of his nose.

Toward the back of the line, tatts. And one with combed back silver hair. And one with a baseball cap and the line of jaw that says he means business.

There is no nervous shuffling.

The next man steps forward into position.

She sees nothing. She stands silently, centered, wearing her favorite heels. The blindfold is secure.

She lifts her chin slightly to the left and tips her head to her right, parts her lips slightly to take in his scent, tastes his person in the cologne and soap and air of anticipation that finds her face before the warmth of his skin.

And then the telltale deliciously trapped feeling- the drowning, desires-more kind of breathing- moves through her as his mouth presses to hers. This one, he is the one- for tonight.

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Accept me as I am. I have. One woman cannot be every man’s everything.

Like this:

It’s not true that all the good writers, creative writers are drunks or doing drugs or a bit mentally unstable/depressed etc….that’s just the statistic some use to defend how few break thru the numb, the writing block, the non-feeling part that keeps expression limp and silent. – Ret, 2015

September 10, 1967: On this day, American poet Djuna Barnes proudly told a friend she had become “the most famous unknown in the world.” She guarded her privacy by living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and avoiding most public appearances (goodreads.com).

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Well, unendurable can only be defined by perspective. Today, I’ve got perspective shackled to the wall in my dark basement, left to writhe there, until I choose to recognize its power over my naive and loving being.